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Beltwayjim
on November 4, 2014 at 6:11 pm

I have to go with Mythical. I have to rule out Halcyon because he is no daughter of Aeolus and he was not transformed into a kingfisher. i ruled out Idyllic because I don’t associate David Brooks with perfect, wonderful, or blissful. I don’t know whether his thinking qualifies as Mythical, but irrational was not a choice.

“Impersonalism” must be A Thing because Brooks capitalized it. Or maybe his pinkie finger slipped. His notion — “argument” or even “claim” would be too generous — is that data-driven microtargeting lets candidates parse voters into demographic and interest groups and tell each group what they want to hear.

But in Ye Goode Olde Dayes — in Halcyon or Idyllic or more likely Mythical — candidates had Grande Inspirationale Visiones so Ye Goode Olde Voteres weren’t voting on mere self-interest but on Ye Greatere Goode.

Hogwash. It’s not as if candidates use microtargeting to tell These Voters the candidate is pro-choice and tell Those Voters the candidate is pro-life, or any such flip-flop. Instead, a smart candidate uses data-driven microtargeting to enable person-to-person contacts that highlight the parts of the candidate’s agenda most likely to appeal to that voter. As an OFA staffer told Sasha Issenberg in The Victory Lab, “We ran a presidential campaign like a bunch of school board races.”

But that’s too complicated for Brooks. He can’t even be bothered to read his own newspaper, which explained it last week.

Linda
on November 4, 2014 at 6:53 pm

I think Brooks is a time traveler from the Middle Ages. I have been election protection for 11 plus hours. Ugh!